Top 100 Quotes About Novelists
#1. Flora sighed. It was curious that persons who lived what the novelists called a rich emotional life always seemed to be a bit slow on the uptake.
Stella Gibbons
#2. Really there was no deadlier combination than bookworm and megalomaniac. It was, for example, the crazed condition of many novelists and travelers.
Paul Theroux
#3. Military people never seem to apologize for killing each other yet novelists feel ashamed for writing some nice inert paper book that is not certain to be read by anybody.
Leonora Carrington
#4. The difference between a novelist and someone who tinkers around with writing is this: novelists finish their books.
Nancy Etchemendy
#5. Unfortunately for novelists, real life is getting way too funny and far-fetched.
Carl Hiaasen
#6. Southerners make good novelists: they have so many stories because they have so much family.
Gore Vidal
#7. God gets the great stories. Novelists must make do with more mundane fictions.
Richard Flanagan
#8. Every true novelist listens for that suprapersonal wisdom, which explains why great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors. Novelists who are more intelligent than their books should go into another line of work.
Milan Kundera
#9. Novelists have to love humanity to write anything worthwhile. Poets have to love themselves.
Marita Golden
#10. You tell me your favorite novelists and I'll tell you whom you vote for, or whether you vote at all.
Stephen Vizinczey
#11. I really do believe some people are naturally novelists and some people are short story writers. For me, when I was in middle school or high school, I started with novels.
M.K. Hobson
#12. They are very large in effect, these painters; very little self-conscious; they have smooth broad spaces in their minds where I am all prickles & promontories.
Virginia Woolf
#13. There are many reasons why novelists write but they all have one thing in common a need to create an alternative world.
John Fowles
#14. I feel that historical novelists owe it to our readers to try to be as historically accurate as we can with the known facts. Obviously, we have to fill in the blanks. And then in the final analysis, we're drawing upon our own imaginations. But I think that readers need to be able to trust an author.
Sharon Kay Penman
#15. Novelists have to be adept at controlling the flow of information, and, most crucially, they have to be in charge of the narrative.
Ian McEwan
#16. Some Pulitzer winners - novelists - have confided to me that getting the prize screwed them up. It messed with their heads. That hasn't been my experience.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#17. All novelists must form their personal pacts in some way with the slowness of their craft. There are some who demand of themselves a 'rate of production,' for whom it's a matter of pride to complete, say, a book every year.
Graham Swift
#18. Novelists are evil psychopomps, basically. We treat a few characters as real, but the rest of them are cannon fodder.
Scott Westerfeld
#19. I do have a very strong sense that most of the terrible things in life happen suddenly and unpredictably, and certainly can sweep you off in different directions, and that is always of interest to a novelist.
Ian McEwan
#20. It is in their 'good' characters that novelists make, unawares, the most shocking self- revelations.
C.S. Lewis
#21. The writing talent of Edinburgh is textured - we have poets, novelists, non-fiction writers, dramatists and more.
Sara Sheridan
#22. The truth is that I know very few novelists who have been satisfied with the adaptation of their books for the screen.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
#23. I could see now that a literary education did not fit one for the popular novelist's trade.Once you had started using words like flavicomous or acroamatic, because you liked the sound of them, you were lost.
Woodrow Wilson
#25. The writer - more especially the novelist - who has not, at one moment or another, considered his publisher unworthy of him, has still to be conceived.
Storm Jameson
#26. The bicycle, the bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets.
Christopher Morley
#27. We crime novelists have a great pulpit. We write about justice and about correcting injustice.
Jesse Kellerman
#28. Poets and novelists and playwrights make themselves, against terrible resistances, give over what the rest of us keep safely locked within our hearts.
Janet Malcolm
#29. Things were easier for the old novelists who saw people all of a piece. Speaking generally, their heroes were good through and through, their villains wholly bad.
W. Somerset Maugham
#30. Most novelists I know went through a period of intense self-examination and self-loathing after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. I certainly did.
Jay McInerney
#31. Mal Peet: "In terms of sustaining a literate and literary culture, the books we put into our children's hands are immeasurably more important than the latest works of high-profile novelists.
M.G. Harris
#32. It is not the office of a novelist to show us how to behave ourselves; it is not the business of fiction to teach us anything.
Agnes Repplier
#33. If you need proof of how the oral relates to the written, consider that many great novelists, including Joyce and Hemingway, never submitted a piece of work without reading it aloud.
Frank Delaney
#34. The bad novelist constructs his characters; he directs them and makes them speak. The true novelist listens to them and watches them act; he hears their voices even before he knows them.
Andre Gide
#35. While victors may get to write history, novelists get to write/right reality.
M.T. Bass
#36. I think I belong to America's last generation of novelists. Novelists will come one by one from now on, not in seeming families, and will perhaps write only one or two novels, and let it go at that.
Kurt Vonnegut
#37. Even if I couldn't get my early novels published, I could still write. I went into newspapers, where I got paid to write every day. If there's a better school for would-be novelists, I don't know what it is.
Linwood Barclay
#38. I am persuaded that not a novel in ten thousand is of any use to a child to fit him for life. The most are of use only to unfit him
to blunt his senses and infect him with the writers' poor silly sentiments. Nine out of ten novelists deserve to be prosecuted under an Adulterated Emotions Act.
Storm Jameson
#39. So far as love or affection is concerned, psychologists have failed in their mission. The little we know about love does not transcend simple observation, and the little we write about it has been written better by poets and novelists.
Harry Harlow
#40. The novelist has more and more to say to readers who have less and less time to read: where to find the energy to engage a culture in crisis when the crisis consists in the impossibility of engaging with the culture?
Jonathan Franzen
#41. Many thousands of people have had the experience of finding the first friend, and it is none the less a wonder; as great a wonder (pace the novelists) as first love, or even greater.
C.S. Lewis
#42. I'm really aware that in fiction, women are pretty much equal. There's a lot of very successful women novelists. Not so much [for women writers working] in film.
Emma Donoghue
#43. Novelist by day; screenwriter by night.
A.D. Posey
#44. Grab what you can and fight your way to a lifeboat.' Everyone associated with the slow printed word is fast becoming the Great Crested Newt of the culture. First it was the poets, the playwrights, then the novelists. Veteran newspapermen are next.
Marisha Pessl
#45. No novelists any good except me. Sovietski
yah! Nastikoff
bah! I spit me of zem all. No novelists anywhere any good except me. P. G. Wodehouse and Tolstoi not bad. Not good, but not bad. No novelists any good except me.
P.G. Wodehouse
#46. To ask a novelist to talk about his novels is like asking somebody to cook about their dancing.
Jim Crace
#47. With the right tools, you can write anything ...
Jeff Lyons
#48. James Salter has talents on the page we novelists would sell souls to the devil for.
Sarah Hall
#49. Being an unpublished novelist has about as much social acceptability as being a shopping bag lady.
James Frey
#50. I saw novelists as being admirable people and I thought ... I thought ... maybe, one day, I could be one of them.
Michael Palin
#51. By measuring individual human worth, the novelist reveals the full enormity of the State
Ian McEwan
#52. Stories full of metaphors are by writers who play the language like a mandolin for our entertainment, novelists,
Yann Martel
#53. My aim is a simple one. It is to smash the pedestal of boring upon which modern novelists and their books stand.
Joshua Humphreys
#54. Reading is the most rewarding form of exile and the most necessary discipline for novelists who burn with the ambition to get better.
Pat Conroy
#55. I know I'm a rare person, a trained scientist who writes fiction, because so few contemporary novelists engage with science.
Barbara Kingsolver
#56. A novelist is someone who sits around the house all day in his underwear, trying not to smoke.
Scott Spencer
#57. Always seek for balance in your life: If you stayed long in the darkness, walk long in the light; if you talked too much, stay silent for a good while; if you climbed the high mountains, hike long on the plains! Balance everything!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#58. On lady novelists: As artists they're rot, but as providers they're oil wells; they gush. Norris said she never wrote a story unless it was fun to do. I understand Ferber whistles at her typewriter.
Dorothy Parker
#59. People have many cruel expectations from writers. People expect novelists to live on a hill with three kids and a spouse, people expect children's story writers to never have sex, and people expect all great poets to be dead. And these are all very difficult expectations to fulfill, I think.
C. JoyBell C.
#60. There is an enormous pressure placed on gay novelists because they are the only spokespeople. The novelist's first obligation is to be true to his own vision, not to be some sort of common denominator or public relations man to all gay people.
Edmund White
#61. Copywriters, journalists, mainstream authors, ghostwriters, bloggers and advertising creatives have as much right to think of themselves as good writers as academics, poets, or literary novelists.
Sara Sheridan
#62. For novelists or musicians, if they really want to create something, they need to go downstairs and find a passage to get into the second basement. What I want to do is go down there, but still stay sane.
Haruki Murakami
#63. The movies are fun, but I'm a novelist. In many ways, screenwriting is much easier than writing novels. I find screenplays twenty times easier to write than a novel.
Nicholas Sparks
#64. I think most novelists I know, certainly including me, feel the novels choose them rather than vice-versa.
Steve Erickson
#65. They can't yank a novelist like they can a pitcher. A novelist has to go the full nine, even if it kills him.
Ernest Hemingway,
#66. Outcasts may grow up to be novelists and filmmakers and computer tycoons, but they will never be the athletic ruling class.
Chuck Klosterman
#67. If you really want to feel the life, use not your umbrella! Touch the truth directly!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#68. Novelists are a special breed. They cannot genuinely trust anything they have not seen with their own eyes or touched with their own hands (Salon, 20 February 2009).
Haruki Murakami
#69. Novelist time is reptile time; novelists tend to be ruminant and brooding, nursers of ancient grievances, second-guessers, Tuesday afternoon quarterbacks, retrospectators, endlessly, like slumping hitters, studying the film of their old whiffs.
Michael Chabon
#70. People really want to believe that there is no fiction. I think they find it much easier to imagine that novelists are writing memoirs, writing about their lives, because it's difficult to conceive that there's a great imaginary life in which you can participate.
Mark Leyner
#71. I don't get on with novelists, don't enjoy their company. Once you've worked for a publisher, you understand the species, see them in their natural habitat, and it's not always pretty.
Neil Cross
#72. The novelist's
any writer's
object is to whittle down his meaning to the exactest and finest possible point. What, of course, isfatal is when he does not know what he does mean: he has no point to sharpen.
Elizabeth Bowen
#73. All novelists I speak to about how they started usually say it was by pulling up their roots and going to live somewhere else. You see the shape of your life at a distance.
Deborah Moggach
#74. You might learn as much about how to write by reading Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Wallace Stevens, Raymond Chandler, Saul Bellow, Paul Muldoon or a hundred other good novelists or poets than by seeing another round of John Ford revivals.
David Denby
#75. Morality for the novelist is expressed not so much in the choice of subject matter as in the plot of the narrative, which is perhaps why in our morally bewildered time novelists have often been timid about plot.
Jane Rule
#76. Alternate history fascinates me, as it fascinates all novelists, because 'What if?' is the big thing.
Kate Atkinson
#77. I'm a novelist. Fortunately I don't have to rule the world.
Salman Rushdie
#78. I'm a novelist, period. An American novelist.
Don DeLillo
#79. Travel does what good novelists also do to the life of everyday, placing it like a picture in a frame or a gem in its setting, so that the intrinsic qualities are made more clear. Travel does this with the very stuff that everyday life is made of, giving to it the sharp contour and meaning of art.
Freya Stark
#80. The second person to write a story about a young boy and an escaped slave on the Mississippi wasn't a novelist, he was a typist.
Seth Godin
#81. I do not travel. I am not much of an extrovert, and I'm not much interested in extroverted objects. I do not care for the 'ideas' of novelists. Novels are wonderful, of course, but I prefer newspapers.
Will Cuppy
#82. A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction.
Graham Greene
#83. Many of the novelists I admire never left their hometown. Look at Flannery O'Connor. So many of the great Russians never left Russia. Shakespeare never left England. The list goes on.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#84. Lawrence Kelter is an exciting new novelist, who reminds me of an early Robert Ludlum.
Nelson DeMille
#85. I've always played that edge of fact and fiction. I used to be a filmmaker, and certainly in film that's a line that filmmakers cross more readily and more easily than novelists.
Ruth Ozeki
#86. The best of our fiction is by novelists who allow that it is as good as they can give, and the worst by novelists who maintain that they could do much better if only the public would let
them.
James M. Barrie
#87. Novelists want to be published and need a publisher to decide to print 20,000 copies. So you need to entertain on some level. I want to reach out and connect.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#88. The novelist is bound by the reasonable possibilities, not the probabilities, of his culture.
Flannery O'Connor
#89. To be motivated to write a novel, I need to be unable not to write.
Johnny Rich
#90. Once upon a time, novelists of the 19th century, such as Charles Dickens, published in serial form.
Margaret Atwood
#91. For the novelist or poet, for the scientist or artist, the question is not where do ideas come from, the question is how they come. The how is the mystery. The how is fragile.
E.L. Konigsburg
#92. Thank God for novelists. Thank God there are people willing to write everything down. Otherwise, so much would be forgotten.
Kurt Vonnegut
#93. But the other Ministers considered that to employ a magician was one thing, novelists were quite another and they would not stoop to it.
Susanna Clarke
#94. I wrote my first novel in the same conditions as most first novelists - I had a full-time job, I shared an apartment, I had no time - and so I became a compulsive outliner of everything. Ever since then, my process has consisted of trying to forcibly rid myself of that compulsion.
Jonathan Dee
#95. Human nature provides the lyrics, and we novelists just compose the music.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#96. Where does any novelist pick up any character? For the most part, in town, to be sure.
Herman Melville
#97. Novelists are always resisting autobiographical readings of their work, because they know how false those can be.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#98. I was once a graduate student in Victorian literature, and I believe as the Victorian novelists did, that a novel isn't simply a vehicle for private expression, but that it also exists for social examination. I firmly believe this.
Margaret Atwood
#99. There is not now, nor I suspect will there ever be, a le Carre novel with ninjas in it. Most serious novelists are wary of including ninjas in their writing. That's a shame, because many much-admired works of modern fiction could benefit from a few.
Nick Harkaway
#100. What's important is the tolerance. If people are not beating other people up, or shooting them for being different, then that's progress. Even if the ideas that go through their head are fodder for novelists.
Nell Zink
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
